The Madwoman Upstairs

by Catherine Lowell

  At least, that’s how the story went. If it were true, it must have indeed been upsetting for Anne. But was one badly thought-through affair enough to account for her complete transformation? There was nothing extraordinary about this particular seduction except that it involved an older woman, and the whole affair was très middle class. Anne would have witnessed Branwell’s womanizing too often to be shocked. No, something else must have been going on in the shadows of that manor—something that would drive a shy nineteenth-century woman to sacrifice her good name and write not only one but two novels.

  Here, I turned to the world of the servants. Thorp Green had an entire soap opera’s worth of maids, butlers, cooks, cleaners, and gardeners. There was one member of the staff whom I found unusually intriguing: Ann Marshall, with whom Anne Brontë became reasonably close. Ann was the personal maid and confidante of Mrs. Robinson, and a strange, reclusive person. Much like Anne Brontë, she had arrived as a wide-eyed girl in her twenties, years before. By the time she died, alone, in 1847, Ann Marshall was a frail spinster who never spoke more than two words at one time to anyone. What accounted for the dramatic change? And what was it about Thorp Green that took in young women, then spat them out as pale versions of their former selves?

  I picked up the book in front of me and did a quick search for Ann Marshall’s portrait. Relegated to a tertiary character in the Brontë lives, she usually only made it into the footnotes. And yet, she was the only servant whom Anne Brontë had ever taken the trouble to paint. I found her portrait on page four hundred and twenty. She was plain and aging, with turned-down lips and a rounded nose the size of a small umbrella. She was wearing an ugly brown frock and an old bonnet. It was the same portrait I had seen in the Ashmolean. I stared at her sour face, as I had so often done before.

  My lip curled. Ann Marshall was the spitting image of Grace Poole, my least favorite character from Jane Eyre (and, apparently, Orville’s favorite). “There she sat,” Jane Eyre remarked of Grace, “staid and taciturn-looking, as usual, in her brown stuff gown, her check apron, white handkerchief, and cap.” In Jane Eyre, Grace Poole was the personal caretaker of the madwoman and the bearer of a terrible household secret. I would have wagered anything that Ann Marshall’s story was similar. And Anne’s?

  At this thought, I closed the book, feeling a resentment that I hadn’t felt in years. There was no denying the parallels between Anne Brontë’s time at Thorp Green and Jane Eyre’s time at Thornfield Hall. Jane Eyre told the story of a lonely woman who becomes a governess at a lonely manor, uncovers a horrible mystery, and then runs away without telling anyone what really happened to her. If it sounded like Anne Brontë’s life, it was because it was Anne Brontë’s life.

  It left me with one nagging question. How, exactly, had Charlotte Brontë gotten away with stealing her sister’s story?

  CHAPTER 8

  The week of Christmas brought in the biggest storm of the season. The papers—the real papers, not the Hornbeam—had already speculated that it would be the worst we’d seen all year, so bundle up and stay safe, advised the perky notice in the Telegraph. I didn’t read much else about it because reading the newspaper was a thing I no longer did. All it did was remind me of all the unread e-mails I had from English journalists inquiring about Sir John’s new book. Is it true? Would you care to comment? Would you be open to an interview? Would you kindly respond?

  I didn’t think much of the approaching storm until Thursday evening, when Marvin asked if I needed candles. I was checking my mailbox (the “pidge”) in the Plodge, and he was packing up for the holidays. Hilary term wouldn’t begin for another month.

  “Candles?” I asked. “Why would I need candles?”

  “In case there is a power outage,” he said. In his mud-colored bowler hat and matching trench coat, he looked as if he were going out for a walk in the 1920s.

  “Does that happen a lot around here?” I asked.

  He gave a shrug of a smile. “Your tower isn’t known for its electricity.”

  “It’s not known for its central heating, either.”

  Marvin looked somewhat sheepish. He held out the candles, like I had instead said, “Checkmate,” and he was handing me his king. I still carried residual anger toward him, and I believe he was aware of it. I had come here several times in the last month, demanding to see the list of people who had been inside my tower the day that Jane Eyre appeared on my desk. But Marvin insisted it was out of his power and outside the university’s privacy policy to divulge names. I decided that he and I were no longer friends.

  “No,” I told Marvin, finally. “No candles.”

  “You’d prefer the dark?”

  I let out a violent sneeze before I left, and said: “I hate the dark. I just dislike fire more.”

  By Christmas Eve I was in bed with a bad fever. My head seemed to have gained twenty pounds, and I half expected it to sway and plunge to the ground like a wounded bull. All I could do was lie back in bed and listen as the thuggish wind pounded on my roof.

  Everyone I knew was home for the holidays. I had considered going to Boston for Christmas, but since my old house was now inhabited by two men named Schwartz, I would have had to stay with my old friend Sven the Tennis Pro. My mother had tried to insist that I spend the week with her in Paris, but that seemed like an even lonelier option. The more time we spent together, the more we would have to acknowledge how little we had in common. Besides, I would be visiting her at the end of January and that seemed like enough.

  Now, of course, I wished I had somewhere to go. It was the one time of year when it was impossible not to compare yourself to fat, happy families. I hadn’t seen anyone in three days and I was so alone that being alone had lost its meaning entirely. Three-dimensional people seemed to be a thing of a distant and cartoonish past. I began to talk to myself. Normally, at first, then abnormally. I re-created conversations I’d had—with my mother, with my father, with my old friend Sally, who ate with her hands. I invented conversations that never happened, sometimes with the Governess and sometimes with James Timothy Orville III. I was becoming somewhat unhinged.

  Time passed slowly, like an old horse wandering through the Moors, trying to find a quiet place to die. At some point in the evening—was it nine? ten?—I left my tower to brush my teeth. Thanks to the flooding caused by the storm, the bathroom on the ground floor of the tower was out of commission. I would have to use the restroom in the main building, which meant a long (and cold) walk down a connecting corridor. It was a dimly lit hallway, punctuated with custodial closets and the occasional grotesque carving on the walls. I walked slowly at first. I was wearing a coat and my oversize I Love Lucy pajamas. The shirt was ripped at the neck and hung off one shoulder like a dislocated joint. A primordial death draft seeped out from the building’s pores, and I wrapped my coat tighter around myself. I don’t think even my father could have imagined a place more removed from the stir of society—a perfect misanthrope’s heaven.

  Suddenly, when I was halfway down the corridor, the lights went out, silently and cleanly. I stopped. I tried not to panic. I waited for my eyes to adjust but they did not. In the black void, I reached out a hand and grasped for something—anything. I found nothing. My arm was suspended in soupy shadows. I pulled out the mini flashlight on my key chain, but its light was weak. Slowly, I turned and tried to retrace my steps to the tower. I found the wall—yes?—and the door that had been marked Esphestus. The air was wolfishly cold.

  I felt very uneasy. An imagination left alone in the dark can be a terrible thing. The sound of raindrops now echoed like footsteps in the shallow night. Was there someone else in this corridor with me? I paused, and listened. For the first time since I arrived at Oxford, I wasn’t quite as alone as I wanted to be.

  “Hello?” I called.

  No response. In a moment, my toes collided with the damp, clammy stone of my tower’s staircase. I let out a breath of relief, and started climbing. Five flights of stairs were still hard
on my barely recovered ankle, and it took me twice as long as I wanted. I was panting when I arrived at my landing. The air was spiked with an unusual odor—clover? I hesitated only for a moment, then reached for my doorknob. I stopped. No, I was right—it was most definitely clover. A scent I recognized from long ago. I turned around. I wrinkled my nose and took another sniff. Perhaps my temporary blindness had heightened my sense of smell. Or else—

  I blinked. “Hello?”

  No sound, no movement—only the silent shifting of air, the slow trickle of heat along my forehead, and the distinct sense that if eyes could glow red, there would be two of them, staring at me from across the dark expanse.

  I stopped where I was. “Who’s there?”

  No response.

  My breathing was labored. I took a step forward and reached out my arm. After a few strides, my fingers gently collided with the opposite wall. I let out a breath, embarrassed. It had been nothing. I took a few steps back toward my door and let my mini flashlight shine its frail beam on the doorknob.

  And that’s when I saw it. Lying on the doormat, like a sleeping tiger, was Wuthering Heights.

  I whirled around, too late. “Who’s there?”

  Suddenly, a great many things happened all at once: a swath of cloth swept past my right side; I let out a healthy scream; a gust of wind slammed against the side of the tower; a figure hurtled toward the stairs. In the weak beam of my key chain flashlight, I caught only one image: a white hand gripping at the handrail. I shrieked and backed up—unfortunately, right to the edge of the staircase, where I lost my footing. I let out a loud cry. My ankle gave way, and I found myself splayed out on the stairs. I clutched the handrail and tried to pull myself up. The uneven clacking of my visitor’s footsteps had grown soft. Whoever it was was already halfway down the tower.

  I stayed where I was, paralyzed by fear. We all have visions of bravery, but it often materializes only after the moment has passed. I wish I could say that I ran after the intruder and hunted him down, but instead I lay there, sprawled against the stairs, loath to make any noise at all. I was conscious of nothing but the cold stone beneath the palm of my hand and the searing pain in my reinjured foot. I touched the spot on my arm where the intruder had brushed past me.

  After a few minutes, I felt well enough to stand. The real danger must have been gone because I was already beginning to imagine how I would tell the story to someone else. I brought myself to my feet and picked up the book from the doormat. Wuthering Heights. Of all the horrors! I flashed a pathetic light on the words Tristan Whipple, his book, which were etched on the cover in permanent red ink. The only other proof I needed of its origin was on the first blank page, where the outline of a human hand appeared. We had traced that hand, a long time ago, he and I. It was my eleven-year-old palm, my scraggly middle-school fingers.

  I walked into my room and immediately tossed the book into the corner of the room, where I had discarded Agnes Grey and Jane Eyre. In the darkness, I imagined the three of them were tiny, grinning grinches. Emily Brontë’s voice came unannounced into my head: What else could it be that made me pass such a terrible night? I don’t remember another that I can at all compare with it since I was capable of suffering.

  I stared into that blackened corner like I would stare at my own epitaph. Wasn’t this the way it had always been? Just me and the Brontës, trying to see each other across an eternal void.

  A half hour later, I was standing outside the Faculty Wing. The rain had abated, but the wind was something vicious, and it slapped against my face like a fish out of water. It was stupid of me to come here. I was not well. I should have been in bed. But the idea of being alone with Wuthering Heights was dreadful. My tower was not big enough for the two of us.

  Really, I just wanted to see Orville. I recognized that it was Christmas Eve, and that he was likely home with his secret girlfriend and all of his illegitimate children, whom I imagined would be swarming around his ankles like bastard puppies. Yet despite the hour, it wasn’t long before the front door of the Faculty Wing swung open. Two professors were on their way home. They were laughing. The man was holding a paper package in one hand and what appeared to be a centerpiece of a table in the other. Of course, I had forgotten. The faculty and staff who remained in Oxford for the holidays were always invited to their own Christmas banquet.

  I recognized one of the professors as Flannery, the woman I had met at the hospital. She was wearing purple tonight, an unflattering shade the color of a bruise. Her companion was a withered old gentleman with a hooked nose and three moles arranged in a Bermuda Triangle on his lower left cheek. Both of them looked startled to find me there, but Flannery in particular seemed shocked—shocked, and then pleased. She was looking at me as though she had finally found proof supporting an old and elaborate theory.

  “I’d like to see Professor Orville,” I said.

  Flannery was standing in the doorway. “What do you need, dear? It’s a holiday.”

  I glanced at the door behind them, which was slowly beginning to creak shut. I hurried: “Something’s happened, and I’ve come for help.”

  “Goodness, what is it?” said the man. He had a kind smile; I liked him. He looked like the sort of person who had gone by “lad” as a child. “You can talk to one of us, I’m sure.”

  “Thank you,” I said, glancing between them. He and Flannery must have been a couple—he took her hand and she let him hold it. I looked away.

  I said, “I’d prefer to talk to Orville.”

  “Dr. Orville,” corrected Flannery. I looked back at her and then at the door, which had gently closed. She had a strange look on her face. “There is a resident dean in each college throughout the holidays,” she said, repositioning her purse on her shoulder. “Surely you can talk to Dean Sidney?”

  “I tried,” I lied. “He’s not there at the moment.”

  Flannery wasn’t smiling. “Dean Sidney,” she said slowly, “is a she.”

  I didn’t respond. I had never met Dean Sidney.

  “Why don’t you go back home,” she said, ending the conversation in a way that suggested she had many more things she could have said on the subject, were it not Christmas. The man tipped his hat and told me to mind the weather. Flannery smiled and followed him along the path. I wrapped my arms around my chest and said, “Yes, yes, very well.” They took a right, and I took a left, but only briefly. As soon as they were out of sight, I doubled back. The door had not closed all the way, I noticed, and quietly I crept inside.

  The electricity was out here, too, and the candelabras were lit. I hated the look of raw flame. It was unstable and manic. I walked quickly up the staircase. The light grew dimmer. I credited instinct with taking me toward Orville’s room like a moth to a spiderweb. I let one hand graze the wall. I ran my fingers over the nameplates like I would read Braille. Milton, Norris, Northington. The last door, Orville’s, was locked. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he was gone.

  Silently, I pressed my head against the cool wood, easing the heat around my temples. I felt ill—truly ill. I heard the thumping of my own heart as it beat through my ears. There was a terrible ache in my head, and for the first time in my life, I had so little strength that I could hardly stand. I pressed my back against the door and let myself sink to the ground. I decided to wait—just a moment—for the ache to go away.

  It is past midnight and Anne Brontë is holding a candle. She is wandering around the upper corridor of Thorp Green, the one that leads nowhere and smells like cabbage. It is storming outside, and the wind is shrieking through the walls. Anne cautiously rounds the corner. She has heard Bessie tell the other servants there are rumors of a woman who roams these halls—a woman who is as large as an ox and taller than the master. Anne can hear this strange woman laughing at night, and she is determined to catch her. She holds the candle firmly in her hand and creeps down the corridor. Every night, she hopes to find something shocking, and every night, she finds nothing but her own ref
lection in the windows.

  Suddenly, the upstairs hallway fades in front of her. How strange, Anne thinks. It doesn’t seem to be Thorp Green anymore, but a different house entirely, one with new, hardwood floors and ugly bright red curtains that have clearly been chosen out of a catalogue by a man. A girl steps into the hall. Why is she wearing pajamas? Her hair is dark and wild, and she has the bemused look of someone who has just awakened. The unease on the girl’s face grows. Her eyes are wide and she is coughing. There is, Anne realizes, smoke everywhere. Then, in a moment, the girl is bellowing. She runs down the hall, but she can only move in slow motion. That’s when all the men in uniform start pouring in—where have they come from, anyway? Whose nightmare is this? Someone tugs the girl around the waist and yanks her down the stairs, across the hall, out of the house—there is a great rushing sound by her ears. Anne is no longer on the outside, she is the girl, she is the one screaming—and why is she screaming? And more important, why are there so many people on such a narrow old street? The noise softens, settles, and dies. Anne is sitting on the sidewalk, and there is a uniformed man with big feet talking to her, and the sun is rising over the rooftops.

  “Samantha.”

  “Harrumph.”

  “Samantha.”

  I opened my eyes. At first, I saw only a reddish glow.

  “Is this hell?” I murmured.

  “To you, perhaps.”

  My eyes adjusted. I was inside Orville’s office, lying on his leather sofa. He was sitting in the opposite chair, legs crossed, reading the paper. He was wearing a maroon sweater and glasses that reflected the dying flames from the fireplace. I wondered how many years had passed since I had sat down against his door, or whether we had always been like this, he and I, and my life before I knew him had all been an elaborate fiction.